An open mind--the willingness to consider experiences, beliefs, values, perspectives, etc. that differ from one's own--allows the learner to explore how diverse people across the world think and act. Open-mindedness creates opportunities to rethink assumptions, identify misinformation, and consider alternative ways to make decisions.…

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features…

In the English lexicon, laryngeal alternations in the plural (e.g. "leaf" ~ "leaves") impact monosyllables more than finally stressed polysyllables. This is the opposite of what happens typologically, and would thereby run contrary to the predictions of "initial-syllable faithfulness." Despite the lexical pattern, in a wug test we found…

Purpose: To examine the effects and generalization of a modified script training intervention, delivered partly via videoconferencing, on dialogue scripts that were produced by 2 individuals with aphasia. Method: Each participant was trained on 2 personally relevant scripts. Intervention sessions occurred 3 times per week, with a combination of…

Previous research indicates that infants generalize syntactic-like structures to novel exemplars in a way that has been characterized as abstract and algebraic (Marcus et al., 1999). Infants appear to learn and generalize from speech more successfully than from nonspeech stimuli (Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007). In this series of experiments,…

Researchers have shown that children with autism have difficulty with non-literal language, such as irony, sarcasm, deception, humor, and metaphors. To date, few studies have attempted to remediate these deficits, and no studies of which we are aware have attempted to teach children with autism to understand metaphors. Metaphorical reasoning…

We examined a procedure consisting of a preference assessment, prompting, contrived conditioned establishing operations, and consequences for correct and incorrect responses for teaching children with autism to mand "which?" We used a modified multiple baseline design across 3 participants. All the children learned to mand "which?" Generalization…

The aim of this research is to critique the repercussions of over-generalization of a social issue as depicted in Norma Khouri's "Forbidden Love." The novel/memoir has been written against the 9/11 backdrop and as such serves as means of sensationalizing and exploiting a cultural event which unfortunately echoes in the East. The…

Given the serious consequences of making ill-fated admissions and funding decisions for applicants to graduate and professional school, it is important to rely on sound evidence to optimize such judgments. Previous meta-analytic research has demonstrated the generalizable validity of the "GRE"® General Test for predicting academic…

National estimates of students' writing abilities in the United States indicate that in 2002, 72% of elementary-aged students were unable to write with grade-level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). Although performance feedback is one type of intervention that improves students' writing skills, no study to date has examined…

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity…

Generalizability and decision studies provide a mathematical framework for quantifying the stability of a given number of measurements. This approach is especially relevant to the task of obtaining a representative measure of communicative behavior in young children and supports an alternative to the debate regarding which type of assessment…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM] noted that middle and high school students are expected to be able to both explain inequalities by using mathematical symbols and understand meanings by interpreting the solutions of inequalities. Unfortunately, research has revealed that not only do middle and high school students hold…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether self-regulated learning (SRL) skills trained using a social network system (SNS) may be generalized outside the training session. A total of 29 undergraduate students participated in the study. During the training session, students in the experimental group were trained to practice…

Typologists have long observed that there are certain distributional patterns that are not evenly distributed among the world's languages. This discussion note revisits a recent experimental investigation of one such intriguing case, so-called "universal 18", by Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre (2012). The authors find that adult learners are…